Beijing  - Chinese troops and rescue services on Monday reached the last 77 villages that had been cut off for about one week since an earthquake hit the south-western province of Sichuan, the government said Monday, as several more survivors were rescued from collapsed buildings.

Troops and paramilitary police had reached all 3,669 villages in Sichuan and neighbouring regions by Monday after 77 were reportedly still cut off on Sunday because of transportation and telecommunication problems, the official Xinuha news agency said.

The death toll from the magnitude-8 earthquake on May 12 had risen to 34,073 by midday Monday with nearly 10,000 still buried under rubble and about 30,000 listed as missing.

The government last week said it expected the final death toll to reach more than 50,000.

Some roads in 52 townships in Sichuan remained blocked and telecommunications were still not restored to 62 townships, the agency said.

The government began three days of national mourning for the earthquake victims Monday and suspended the Olympic torch relay through China.

Donations of cash and materials from China and overseas, plus relief provided by the government, totalled 1.55 billion dollars by Monday, up from about 1.12 billion dollars on Friday, the agency said.

Rescue teams found at least two more survivors on Monday morning, and both were sent to hospital in serious condition.

Fifty-year-old Wang Fazhen was pulled from a collapsed residential building at a coal mine near Sichuan's Mianzhu city but she "showed weak life signs and was rushed to hospital," Xinhua said.

Rescuers in Mianzhu said they had detected possible signs of three more survivors in the area where Wang was found.

Another 61-year-old woman was pulled out of rubble in nearby Beichuan town. She was suffering from "multiple bone fractures and serious infections but remained conscious," Xinhua said.

At least 63 people were rescued Saturday in several areas of Sichuan.

Some people survived for up to 10 days after the 1976 earthquake in the northern Chinese city of Tangshan, which killed about 240,000 people.

Xinhua on Sunday quoted Qian Gang, the author of a book on the Tangshan earthquake, as saying one elderly woman had survived for 13 days by drinking her own urine after she was trapped in rubble.

But in reflection of the difficulty facing rescue workers, a team in Sichuan's Yingxiu town was unable to extricate a man and a woman from a collapsed building Sunday and could only drip glucose and water to them through the rubble. (dpa)